


the days when it shines

by rolameny



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23988703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rolameny/pseuds/rolameny
Summary: After the war's end, Temeraire gets a pavilion, a seat in Parliament, and a secretary; Laurence and Tharkay get each other.
Relationships: William Laurence/Tenzing Tharkay
Comments: 20
Kudos: 129





	the days when it shines

**Author's Note:**

> [Happy anniversary to Tharkay and Laurence](https://twitter.com/tanyart/status/1256950244090077184), who first invented romance.
> 
> Fic title from Atmosphere's [Sunshine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpqOWO6ctsg).

Tharkay invites them to his estate in spring; they are settled before May. Temeraire spends a week sniffing indecisively around the grounds, frightening away all the deer, before deciding on a location for his future pavilion — directly to the side of the house, on the south slope. Will's bedroom window overlooks it: Tharkay had presented it to him with a small smile, a smile that returns when Temeraire makes his selection.

Tharkay is occupied much of the time with the business of his lands; they had been neglected at best and mismanaged at worst, all the long years of his suit, and Tharkay is now forever going to town on business or receiving solicitors in his own airy parlour, looking every part the country gentleman, black hair sleek in its queue and his neckcloth precisely tied.

It had been a surprise to see him so, that first day, when Tharkay had compounded the shock by inviting Will and Temeraire to stay with them — to stay with them indefinitely, at that. But Tharkay wears all his clothes like a costume, with that same faint sardonic smile, as though it amuses him to play the country gentleman now as it had amused him to play an itinerant before, and very quickly Will ceases to see the costume at all.

Will himself is occupied with acting as Temeraire's business-agent for a time, writing letters to architects and builders and members of Parliament besides, until Tharkay suggests, mildly but with that same gleam of private humour about his eyes, that Temeraire hire a secretary, just as other politicians did, when they wanted someone to handle their papers for them.

Temeraire is at first put off by the notion, then intrigued by the idea of having a staff all of his own, and then Will finds himself organizing _interviews_ for the post of his dragon's secretary, and privately finding the thing as amusing as Tharkay. Temeraire clearly misses having a crew, and Miss Copley, who had been seeking work as a governess before some inexplicable quirk had made her answer the advertisement, makes a good replacement for a second lieutenant. She takes one quick step back and goes pale, when she is brought to Temeraire's pavilion for her interview, and then clearly steels herself to take two steps forward to make up for it. She goes from bravely determined to completely at her ease in record time for someone with no family in the Corps and not from any town near a covert; she had simply looked up at a creature that could eat her in a single mouthful and _refused_ to be afraid. Witnessing this, Tharkay raises his eyebrows and shrugs.

"The terms you and Temeraire are offering are generous. So she prefers stepping into a dragon's den to moving herself entirely into a strange household: I cannot fault her judgment."

Miss Copley is engaged to come four mornings a week; and so Will is freed from much of his own secretarial duty to Temeraire. He is still called on to as political advisor — often he wakes up the morning to a not-very-surreptitious tap at his window and the increasingly familiar sound of crumbling brick, and rises to see Temeraire's great eye hovering just outside, to anxiously ask Will's opinion on some notion or another that had arisen during the night — but Miss Copley, calm, armoured with a writing-desk in a corner of Temeraire's own pavilion, manages most of his affairs ably, with impeccable manners and handwriting both, along with the occasional lecture on the Latin future perfect indicative.

The pavilion and the hiring of the secretary — Temeraire is particular about how Will writes about it in letters to their friends, and indeed it gains the air of a Norse Edda when Temeraire tells it himself to a Greyling messenger stopping over for a companionable sheep — occupies them till halfway through June, when the trees shine emerald under the yellow sun.

Will wakes up one morning, bathes and dresses without thinking, descends to breakfast without thinking. Tharkay tells him a little of his own day's business, and Will nods along, but when he ascends the stairs again to the little parlour that sits next to his bedroom, where Will's own desk lies, he finds himself blank. The post had gone out yesterday; he has no letters to write to friends or on matters of business, nor to read, and no recent newspapers either. He has grown used to caring for his own things during his and Temeraire's decade of near-constant upheaval: all his clothes are pressed and folded or hung, and his room is entirely shipshape.

He gets up once to look out the window and sees Miss Copley already at her desk with the long shafts of late-morning sunlight falling gently through the latticework of the pavilion's upper walls. Her chaperone sits on a low sopha near her — Miss Copley's grandmother, a Mrs Barnard _née_ d'Avigdor, long widowed and too blind to notice the great black dragon a bare ten feet from her.

Temeraire would be busy for hours yet, and wouldn't require anything from Will at all.

So Will has nothing to do, nothing at all: the notion makes a great blank shape in his mind. To be at his ease, not snatching a day of rest between urgent tasks, and not to have that ease flavoured by captivity — Will can't remember the last time he had had a day in which he he had nothing to do at all that _hadn't_ been a result of his capture by one military force or another. Their pavilion in Australia had been a place of rest for him, but he had still been busy daily doing all manner of thing, building their home and herd.

Now Will has nothing at all to do, and the freedom to do whatever he wishes at all, and has no idea what it is he _does_ wish. Sailors knit when they can, but Will never took up the habit: he preferred to find company, in his off hours. Now he gets down a book without looking at the cover, opening it to a random page, and finds himself staring instead at the wall and the line of sunlight upon it bleaching a long rectangle of the blue wallpaper white. Its shape changes over the course of hours, sliding down to the floor and then across, making hilly little shadows in the rug, finally broken by Tharkay opening the door and stepping onto it, his shoes brightly polished and his trousers brushed.

He's holding a folded paper and frowning, and enters speaking: "Laurence, I have had the strangest letter, that I hope you might advise me on—"

Tharkay breaks off as Will starts and says, meaninglessly, "Of course, at once."

The book nearly slips from Will's slack grasp — he saves it from falling, and, shutting it to put it aside, sees for the first time it is written in Spanish; nothing he could read, or even attempt a pronunciation of for Temeraire's sake. 

Tharkay looks at him searchingly. "Something the matter, Laurence?"

Will makes his best attempt to look interested and alert, and says, "Only woolgathering. What's this letter?"

Strange indeed: an application for funds from a distant relative of Tharkay's father, that Tharkay owns he would have dismissed out of hand as an unwelcome liberty from a relative who had always combined a dearth of friendliness with a similar dearth of judgment, if not for the relative mentioning Temeraire as an acquaintance by name. Will frowns down at the name signed at the end of the letter, thinking for a long minute before he can place it.

"At the ball the Admiralty threw, for Bonaparte's defeat," he says finally, handing the letter back to Tharkay. "A young man introduced himself to me by that name as I was leaving, then made his excuses and ran as soon as Temeraire put his head near us from the dragon-pavilion. An enthusiast of the war, I thought, frightened when confronted by the reality of dragons."

"Not too frightened to use one to beg for gambling funds," Tharkay said dryly, folding the letter back up again, his fingers as elegant as his dress. "Thank you; that saves me some effort."

"At your service," Will says, and is startled all over again by the brush of Tharkay's knee against his as Tharkay rises.

"Now," says Tharkay, tapping the edge of the letter against the back of his chair: "I am afraid I have been a poor host, and not given you enough entertainment, Laurence."

"I am perfectly well-entertained: pray do not trouble yourself," Will says hastily.

"No trouble at all. As a retired war hero," Tharkay says, "it is entirely within your rights to spend your days doing nothing but breeding prize roses. Or perhaps prize cattle. Husband any genus you desire, as long as it wins prizes."

Laurence cannot help but make a face at the phrase _war hero_. "I have never _husbanded_ anything in my life; I would be sure to ruin your gardens entirely."

Tharkay gestures with the folded letter in his hand. "They are yours to ruin."

—

Tharkay dresses himself with care each day; he never steps outside his chambers without his last button done up, no matter the day's costume, riding habit or a suit to go to the city in or, rarely, his old traveling leathers. His clothes are a costume and he is a consummate professional of acting: the neckcloth perfectly tied isn't a piece of armour but the stage-actor's greasepaint, the perfect starched folds of it in some way a wink from Tharkay laughing at the whole enterprise.

Which is why it is such a surprise on the day Tharkay descends to breakfast with his neckcloth untied, draped around the open collar of his white shirt. There is something opaque and unreadable in his eyes, but he greets Will just as he does each day, and gives warm thanks for the coffee Will pours.

That is the first time it happens, but it isn't the last; the next night, they share a cigar as Tharkay teaches Will a Persian variation on backgammon, and Tharkay loosens his neckcloth and leans forward across the table to catch up the dice in his long fingers and show Will his next move.

The day after that, Tharkay wanders into the parlour by Will's room in his shirtsleeves, and Will flees.

He takes a walk over the grounds of Tharkay's estate, and ducking into a copse of trees, the thoughts lay themselves out before him: Tharkay never does anything without meaning to. Either he is trying to make Will uncomfortable in some obscure attempt to free his estate of his two guests, or… or he is showing that _he_ is comfortable enough in Will's presence to not appear entirely polished before him.

Will blows out a breath, looking up at the sky through a roof of rustling leaves, and decides that he can do no better than to trust Tharkay's candour and assume that if ever he wants Will and Temeraire gone, he will tell them.

When he looks in later to shift his clothing and let Tharkay know he and Temeraire will be going on a short flight — an hour to a nearby branch of the river Ouse and back — Tharkay is in his own offices with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

— 

Will finds himself at loose ends for the length of the summer: he goes on long walks, learning the land with his feet in a way entirely unlike learning it from Temeraire's back. He takes days to write letters, distracted by the wind moving in the stand of beeches by Temeraire's pavilion. He loses at chess five times in a row and Tharkay doesn't comment at all on his distraction: the kindness of elision.

The long months of June, July, August crawl by, golden and warm, its touchstones the full-body rumble of Temeraire's voice and the sight of Tharkay's hands, handling a chess piece, a pen, a knife.

He sleeps a great deal and goes into town rarely, that great blank patch in his mind a fog he moves through. Tharkay does not press him again to pick up a hobby; instead he smiles wryly, tugging at his gloves, and suggests Will is making up for a decade's lost sleep. Will seems to spend all the summer half-asleep in a cane chair in the estate's solarium, a book in his lap. 

Will begins to wake up as summer makes its excuses by the door, pulling its hat on: a cold breeze winds through a warm early-September day and he sits up in his chair, as though the breeze is tugging at that blank fog in his heart. 

In between chapters of a mathematics text, in the long summer evenings Will reads Temeraire a novel, with neither moral nor educational value, but tremendously entertaining for it; Temeraire, who met Sir Edward Howe at a month of age, has never lost the impression that an author is a person one might write to, is disappointed to learn the novel is credited simply to _A Lady_. 

Tharkay joins them after their second night with the novel: Will obligingly begins again despite Tharkay's mild protest, and finally has the chance to explain one September night, when they are halfway into the third volume, that Temeraire likes to hear a book several times over if it is one enjoys. And sometimes even, Will adds ruefully, "If it is one he particularly dislikes: so that he can be sure to dislike it with his full intellectual capacity."

Tharkay does not laugh aloud very often, but he grins at that, his teeth flashing in the dark, and invites Will up to his parlourfor a round of backgammon.

—

The room is dim, the fire banked and the candles yet unlit. Will and Tharkay sit not across the card-table from each other, for once, but one next to the other, sharing a cigar.

Tharkay sets the cigar down in an ashtray. He leans in, the low light casting soft shadows across his forehead. His eyebrows are knotted as though with anxiety. Will's eyes track helplessly down to the open collar of his shirt and back up again.

Tharkay lays a hand against Will's jaw, warm and callused.

"Will," he says, and Will opens his mouth to say _yes —_ and Tharkay — Tharkay kisses him.

He presses his lips to Will's, and when Will does not respond, he draws back, his sharp smile a knife to cut himself with.

"No need," he begins to say, or something to that effect, and this time Will interrupts him.

"Tharkay," he says, voice doing he knows not what; his cheek is cold without Tharkay's hand on it, and he catches it in his own mid-air, to draw it back to its place.

Tharkay waits, silent, a strange light in his eyes.

"Don't be so quick to give up on me," Will says, and leans in, hoping that Tharkay will understand what he himself doesn't know how to say.

Tharkay draws back eventually, his hand and Will's falling to land clasped in Will's lap.

"You look as though you have been hit on the head; do not protest, I know the look well enough on you," he says, wry despite the speed of his pulse against Will's fingers.

"You have an unfair advantage, you have seen me in every state of injury mankind has yet devised."

"And you I, I think." The shape of Tharkay's hand under Will's: one knuckle on his ring finger still lumpy and malformed, long healed though it is.

Will lays his palm over those fingers and bows his head. "Would that I could see you in as many states of pleasure," he says, very low, to their clasped hands.

Tharkay's right hand comes to join their others, an elegant line despite the many calluses and scars.

"Will—," Tharkay says again. "I would rather have your friendship, wholehearted, than for you to give more than you could without regret, out of some sense of obligation."

That does not require any thought to answer it: "I have not regretted your acquaintance since you took me through the sewers of Istanbul. Nor could I ever," Will says, and adds, tentative: "Tenzing."

For all their long acquaintance, it is only in moments of deepest intimacy and ease that they refer to one another by their given names: all at once, Will resolves to call him _Tenzing_ as often as he can.

"If I hesitate, it is not from distaste, but from a lack of use — Tenzing, I have placed my life in your hands this past decade and more, I have esteemed your judgment above all others, I esteem it above my own. I have been damnably slow to recognize the actions of my own heart, but I find — I find esteem _you_ above all others as well."

Tenzing stays perfectly still, his hands tense in Will's.

"You never do anything but you throw yourself bodily into it, do you," he says at last, his voice rough.

Will cracks a smile at that, helpless, the corners of his eyes falling into wrinkles. "Tenzing," he says, impossibly fond. "You invited a twenty-ton dragon to live on your property."

"So I did. What a pair we make," Tenzing says, and tugs at Will's hands. "Come here, then, if you won't regret it."

There is a clattering behind him: Will's chair falling to its side on the floor, as Will goes to Tenzing's, clumsy in his haste. He finds himself kneeling before Tenzing's chair, between his legs looking up. Tenzing looks down at him, his expression for once washed clean of all wryness: he has a look on his face that Will has only seen on him before when he watched Tenzing watching his hawk on the wing. Tenzing leans in and down to kiss Will again, bracing him with a hand cupped against the back of his neck. His fingers push against the ribbon holding Will's queue in place and knock it out of his hair entirely, leaving it loose around his shoulders, bronze in the firelight.

Despite the floor against his knees, despite the unaccustomed ache in his neck from leaning upwards, there is nowhere Will would rather be. The muscles in Tenzing's thighs are like bands of worked iron, still hot from the forge. His hands cradle Will's head, and his mouth is like the forge itself, pouring pure heat into him, filling him up like a vessel, a crucible.

Will reaches a hand up to Tenzing, thumb catching at the corner of his jaw, rough now with a day's growth of beard. Tenzing deepens the kiss, urging Will towards him with the hand in his hair until Will is only half-kneeling, braced with a hand on the arm of Tenzing's chair, their fronts pressed together. Will shifts and Tenzing gasps: his cock trapped between them pressing against Will's belly.

Tenzing breaks the kiss to lean back and pant as Will brings a hand up to press deliberately against the swell in his breeches, hot and urgent. A feeling rises so swiftly in his breast it leaves him bewildered — he thinks in half-sentences, fragments: _we could do this forever — a lifetime — it can be thus?_

Tenzing pulls himself together with a visible effort and asks, "Will you come to bed with me, Will?"

Without thinking, already rising, Will says, "Anywhere."

Of everywhere in the house, Will has never yet been in Tenzing's bedrooms: cautious of his privacy, unwilling to make himself an unpleasant guest. They are much the same as Will's own, the personal touches coming through in the trinkets on a shelf — not many of them when measured against a lifetime of wandering, but plenty enough. A string of beads, a silver amulet shaped like a hand, a tiny book just the length of his thumb: Will only sees these in passing as Tenzing draws him towards the bed. Inevitable, as though the forces of gravity have leapt from their textbooks and into Tenzing's right hand.

Tenzing sits on the bed with a thump and Will falls in next to him — Tenzing already reaching for Will's neckcloth, unwinding it, leaving Will to breathe freely at last. It takes barely a nudge of Will's own hand to free Tenzing of his already-loosened neckcloth, and they pause to stare again at one another, flushed.

"Never did I think I would be here," Will says, and Tenzing bites at his own lip, as though trying to stop himself from speaking, so Will adds, "And glad I am to be here, an you — an you want me."

Tenzing's eyes soften in a smile. "I brought you twenty feral dragons from Turkey to Prussia, Will; I thought my intentions tolerably clear."

Will laughs at that, a bright sound in the dark room, and brings up Tenzing's fingers still tangled with his neckcloth, so that he may kiss their backs.

"I see I have been abysmally slow to learn once again. Pray let me make it up to you?"

They help each other undress, both of them laughing a little, at first, to see the nearly identical ways they carefully lay out their shirts and trousers, coats and neckcloths on a sea-chest by Tenzing's bed so that they won't develop wrinkles. Then their eyes meet, and the heat fills up Will again in a single instant, and they come together in a crash.

Both of them are nearly more scar than skin, barely any padding over muscle and tendon despite the long, lazy summer: Will hopes the winter will be kinder to them. Tenzing has calves like steel, tense and heavy: Will kisses them as he draws Tenzing's stockings off.

Tenzing touches a scar under Will's collarbone as he helps Will with his shirt — it takes Will a long moment to remember its provenance: the palaces of China, before he even met Tenzing, a lifetime and more ago.

They've both seen each other naked a dozen times and more, on sickbeds and in hasty baths in riverbeds: this is different. Tenzing like this, slowly revealed, his skin painted in the long upwards stroke of the fireplace, the sparse hair on his chest and the heavier thatch at his cock. He fills up Will's eyes, fills them up entirely: a platoon of Marines in their lobster coats could march in and he'd never notice them, not with the junction of Tenzing's jaw and neck revealed, elegant and tense.

Tenzing takes them both in hand, straining to reach around both their cocks at once: his hand on Will, the hot tender press of Tenzing's cock against his, have Will gasping, his chest heaving. Were the room not so dark right now he would be brick-red by now, all the way down to his nipples.

Will manages with effort to take one hand from the cover under them, to add to Tenzing's: Tenzing's hips thrust immediately forward, his cock against Will, their thighs a tangle.

Tenzing is strong, compact: _beautiful_ , thinks Will helplessly, staring at his face, the tension in his jaw, his eyes bright and dark all at once, reflecting the firelight and the light of the moon sitting like a mirror on the black velvet of the sky outside the window.

Will wraps a hand in Tenzing's hair, straight and coarse under his fingers, and draws Tenzing in for a kiss. Both of them are flushed hot and trembling, the heat in Will's cock matched by an equal one in his breast.

Neither of them lasts long, shameful lack of stamina though it may be for two men each past forty: pulling one another closer, fumbling towards a rhythm with their joined hands on their cocks. Will thinks to himself, oddly bewildered, _to have this — to have this_ — and spills between them, Tenzing following directly thereafter.

Afterwards, lying crumpled half on the bed, their legs hanging off still, Tenzing reaches over him to the neat assembly of their clothes on the sea-chest, and sacrifices one of their neckcloths to the cleanup effort. 

Still dazed, Will stares up at Tenzing, at the miracle of him, the muscles of his chest playing out under his skin. 

Tenzing having done his part, Will joins in the struggle and chivvies the both of them up to the head of the bed, dragging the bedclothes up after them. In the moments before he falls asleep, Will presses a kiss to Tenzing's jaw, still marveling at it all.

—

Will wakes to the sun in his eyes: Tenzing's rooms, kitty-corner to his, face full east, and the morning limns their shoulders in bright swathes of copper and gold.

He raises himself to look at Tenzing, the way his hand curls in the sheets, the way the light falls vividly against the hair on his arm.

Tenzing looks as though he is asleep, breathing deep and even: but Will has never known him to outsleep the sun, nor to sleep through someone else moving close by.

"You know," he says, and has to start again; his voice is too rough from sleep. "You know, Tenzing, I joined the Navy at the age of twelve. I couldn't bear the thought of going into the Church and ran away to the sea. And you know what gossips say about the Navy, more than they ever do about the Aerial Corps."

Tenzing's eyes open, suspicious and fully awake. 

"Every ship is full of boys with too much energy and little enough for recreation: the first ship I served on didn't much care what the ensigns and mids got up to, as long as we were — well — discreet enough about our indiscretions."

Tenzing raises his eyebrows: they disappear into his hair, tangled on his forehead from exertion and from sleep. He still doesn't say anything, leaving Will to muddle his way to his point alone.

"There was one mid, a year or two older than me. I thought he hung the moon — I would listen to him above any tutor. Of course when he asked if I wanted to come along with him to the bow I said yes. It felt as though it lasted a year at the time, but to think back on it, it couldn't have been more than three months together.

"Then I made lieutenant, and sent to the _Shorewise_ , and after a time convinced myself I wouldn't die of a broken heart, after all." Will pauses. "Though, Lord above, it's been thirty years and more, and I don't say I could remember his name, or even the colour of his hair, if you gave me the full roll of the Navy."

"And the point of this charming story?"

Will shakes his head. "A whim, I suppose."

"Feel free to indulge any whims you have," Tenzing says, a ghost of a smile tucked away again at the corner of his mouth, and pushes himself up to kiss Will a thorough good morning.

That occupies them for a time, before they separate to bathe and dress: when they meet again in the breakfast-room Tenzing is the perfect country gentleman, starched and pressed, his queue tidy and his neckcloth tied. 

And all the same Will feels his face warm. Just to see Tenzing, just as he is.

Will pours coffee for the both of them: their fingers brush as he passes Tenzing a cup, white porcelain, rimmed in gold.

The day is a Friday, and so, according to their agreement, Miss Copley has not come: her grandmother is of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Tenzing had informed him, though how he knew this Will had no idea. Will has some vague notion that Fridays are important to the Jews, for all their Sabbath falls on Saturday, and did not find it necessary to ask Miss Copley if she preferred to work Mondays to Thursdays for reasons of faith, or simply because she had other engagements.

Miss Copley engaged elsewhere, Temeraire is alone in his pavilion when they approach, fastidiously sweeping leaves from the corners with an entire uprooted sapling as his broom. Will and Tenzing exchange a look at that: _the groundskeeper is sure to make a complaint and for his dignity we must not laugh when he does_ , the look says.

"Oh good," says Temeraire, his voice a pleased rumble; "I am glad you have come together. I had a question I hoped to pose to both of you."

"Of course, my dear," Will says automatically, tucking a new letter from Granby into his book, so it won't flutter away with the breeze winding cool around the ankles, or with a too-hasty flutter of Temeraire's wings.

"I have not wanted to press either of you just yet, but now you are mating, when will you be having an heir? Tharkay, you are a responsible sort, Laurence has been dodging the subject since even before we met the Son of Heaven, but I am sure _you_ will not."

"Oh _Lord_ ," says Will, and next to him Tenzing laughs aloud, the sound warm and clear as the September sun.


End file.
